Conquistador Settler-colonialism & the Crises of Migrant Muslim Complicity

ABSTRACT

Many migrant Muslims to “conquistador settler-colonial” U.S./Canada are driven to become good – settlers because of the devastating imperialist conditions reaped upon our original homelands. However, no Muslim political-theological works address Indigenous struggles or seriously engage settler-colonial studies. Migrant Muslims assume that the U.S./Canada are democratic-secular despite their animation by white-supremacist religious doctrines as Manifest Destiny. This contribution addresses the Qur’anic bases for a globally applicable decolonial, anti-statist/capitalist, social justice, Islam or what I refer to as Anarcha-Islam Drawing on the Qur’anic perspective of ethical-political responsibilities of Muslim hijra (migration), I argue how non-Black migrant Muslims in exile must seriously re-examine their ethical-political commitments and construct mutual alliances with Indigenous and Black peoples in their demands for land’s repatriation as well as reparations.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• decolonization
• abolition
• settlers of color
• Turtle Island
• Palestine
• social movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jacobs Technion-Cornell University website: https://tech.cornell.edu/jacobs-technion-cornell-institute/; Hudson, “Cornell NYC Tech’s Alarming Ties to the Israeli Occupation”.

2 College Foreign Gift and Contract Report: https://sites.ed.gov/foreigngifts/.

3 Koch, “The Desert as Laboratory,” 498.

4 The Cherokee and the other Five Civilized Tribes which included the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole resisted the act. When the allotment process began in 1887, the total land held by American Indian tribes on reservations equaled 138,000,000 acres. By the end of the allotment period landholdings had been reduced to 48,000,000 acres. Since 1934 the landholdings have slowly increased to 56,000,000 acres.

5 Koch, “The Desert As Laboratory,” 498.

Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 303–304; Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

6 Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 99.

7 Yang, A Third University is Possible; examples of autonomous schools include the Zapatista inspired Universidad de la Tierra /Unitierra (University of the Earth) in Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico.

8 Gopal, “On Decolonisation and the University,” 873–899; Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu, Decolonising the University; Thomas and Jivraj, eds., Towards Decolonising the University; Grosfoguel, Velasquez, and Hernandez, Decolonizing the Westernized University.

9 See https://nikolehannahjones.com. Besides eliding Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialism, what Hannah-Jones’ 1619 project also elides is that a third to a fifth of transatlantic slaves were Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, and hence the confluence of race and religion.

10 Bonita Lawrence speech for the Einaudi Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRt3uv50yLA; also see Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism”. Cornell University’s land grab, established under the federal Morrill Act of 1862 included 990,000 acres, has raised endowments of up to $6 million. The land was stolen from the Ojibwe, Miwok, Yokuts, Dakota and other parties through 63 treaties or seizures. It displaced as many as 167 Indigenous Nations and communities. The granted land spans present-day boundaries of California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

11 See Tiffany Lethabo King, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Bonita Lawrence & Zainab Amadahy, Iyko Day, Shona N. Jackson, Stephanie Smallwood, M. Jacqui Alexander, Saidiya Hartman, Kyle T. Mays, Frank Wilderson III, Alaina E. Roberts, Melissa Phung, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley.

12 Shohat, “Staging The Quincentenary,” 97. Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” 148–161.

13 Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims,” 25–29; Chan-Malik, “race”; see Abdou, Islam & Anarchism.

14 Chan-Malik, Being Muslim.

15 Abdelnabi, “[Book Review] Muslim Cool”.

16 Khabeer, Muslim Cool, 28.

17 Auston, “Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality,” 11–22; Wheeler, “On Centering Black Muslim Women in Critical Race Theory”.

18 Ibid.

19 For example, as in the recent collected edition, Half of Faith: American Muslim Marriage and Divorce in the Twenty-First Century. The text which numerous prominent Muslim feminists like Kecia Ali, Zahra Ayubi, Asifa Quraishi-Landes contributed to addresses marriage and divorce within Muslim-American marriage. While critically addressing patriarchal interpretations of Islam, the authors offer differing opinions in their exploration of how Muslim women negotiate their marriage rights, at times through the Christian American settler-state, and other times, through a non-monolithic Shari’ah. At no point, do the scholars, except one in passing the U.S. protestant ethics defining the domain of property and rights, incorporate the lens of settler-colonialism and American patriarchy, in assessing the implications of a Muslim women’s appeal for divorce through the American judiciary and at who’s cost, when they’re achieved, these rights are attained. As much as they are interested in reinventing Shari’ah’s ethical-political foundations, they do not offer a decolonial avenue to the entanglement of Muslim women within the specter of racialized and gendered U.S. Islamophobia as well as Muslim patriarchy. Ali, ed., Half of Faith.

20 Ibid.

21 “Should a Muslim Woman Be President,” Yale Law School: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/yale-law-school-videos/sylvia-chan-malik-should-muslim-woman-be-president; Chan-Malik, is not the only scholar adopting this approach, others, besides her, like Su’ad Abdul Kabeer, who contributed to PBS documentaries like “American Muslims: A History,” equally participate in eliding settler-colonialism. Nadia Marzouki, Zareena Grewal, Doug NeJaime, Anne Urowsky also contributed to the Yale talk.

22 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 1–40.

23 I choose to capitalize Black in this article when discussing Blackness in general, unless I’m referring to a particular Black ethnicity. Indigenous is capitalized and used strictly in the settler context in which I am speaking; I do not use the term to describe Palestinians for instance given that as much as they are native to Palestine, there is less of a “pure” sense of identity given the millinea intermixing that has occurred in the region.

24 Patel, Moussa, and Upadhyay, “Complicities, Connections, & Struggles,” 5–19; Jafri, “Privilege Vs. Complicity,”; Dhamoon, “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism,” 20–37; Phung, “Are People of Colour Settlers Too?”.

25 Collins, “Foreword”; Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xi.

26 “Should Muslim Woman Be President,” Yale Law School: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/yale-law-school-videos/sylvia-chan-malik-should-muslim-woman-be-president

27 Ibid; The Yale speakers noted Black transatlantic Muslims like Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori (referred to as the “prince of slaves”), Omar ibn Said, and Bilali Muhammad (who wrote the “Bilali document” referencing Qur’ānic passages and different religious practices).

28 Ibid. Here, building on Hartman, as I noted elsewhere, I am referring to how “slavery is constantly (re)birthed through: Stand-Your-Ground laws, police brutality and premeditated extrajudicial killings, routine “Stop and Frisk” programs, “Policies of Broken Windows,” voter disenfranchisement, School-to-Prison pipelines, impoverishment and premature deaths, as well as 1994 Crime bills which Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voted for and that superfluously target and incarcerate Black youth who are referred to as “super-predators” and “thugs” within a shattered criminal justice system.” See Mohamed Abdou, Let Empire Collapse: Why We Need A Decolonial Revolution in Roar Magazine, November 2nd, 2020, https://roarmag.org/essays/let-empire-collapse-why-we-need-a-decolonial-revolution/.

29 Ibid.

30 Coulthard, “Beyond Recognition”; Coulthard and Simpson, “Grounded Normativity/Place-Based Solidarity”; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition; Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth. Translated [from the French] by Constance Farrington”; Toward the African Revolution; Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism”; Lovelace, “Decolonization: The Fundamental Struggle for Liberation”.

31 Ibid.

32 Sylvia Chan-Malik 20 years after 9/11, US Muslims Are Writing a New Story, https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/20-years-after-9-11-us-muslims-are-writing-a-new-story-49887, TRTWorld.

33 Ibid., 67; Choueiri, “The Middle East”.

34 Dubios, The Souls of Black Folks, 2–3.

35 Abdou, Let Empire Collapse.

36 Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.

37 Tuck, and McKenzie, “Land Education,” 15; Morgensen, “Un-settling Settler Desires,” 157–158; Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” 52–76.

38 Numerous scholars prior to Chan-Malik have made this point. They include: M. Jacqui Alexander, Gloria Anzaldua, Cornell West, bell hooks, Lata Mani, and Leela Fernandes have claimed that there is a need for the necessity for decolonial spiritualities and that scholar-activists step out of the “spiritual closet. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 15.

39 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 19.

40 Byrd and Rothberg, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity,” 3.

41 Abdou, Islam and Anarchism.

42 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387.

43 Ibid.

44 Abdou, Islam and Anarchism.

45 Ibid.

46 Amadahy, “Interview with Zainab Amadahy Zainab Amadahy in Conversation with Feral Feminisms’ Guest Editors”; Lovelace, “The Last Fire in Ghostland-Keynote Address”; Armstrong, First Nations on Ancestral Connection. Here, indigeneity is conceived “beyond race, ethnicity or political definitions, [and hence] indigeneity can become a social ethic. In this way, the re-indigenized person or community is a perfectly integrated part of nature rather than separate from it” (Ibid).

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 10; Deloria, Playing Indian; Tallbear in Francie Latour, “The Myth of Native American Blood”; Fellows and Razack, “The Race to Innocence,” 335.

50 Day, Gramsci is Dead, 9.

51 Tuck and Yang, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, 9.

52 Ibid.

53 Salaita, Inter/Nationalism; Olwan, “On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms”; .Sherene H Razack, “Stealing the Pain of Others,” 379.

54 Ali, “The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History is More Complicated Than You Think,”.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid. These liberal-progressive stances are exemplified in political stances as Rashida Tlaib, Omar Suleiman, Dahlia Mogahed, and Linda Sarsour, as well as more conservative Muslims like Hamza Yusuf and Sherman Jackson, and others in between such as Zaid Shakir.

57 Ibid.; also see Veracini, “Introducing,” 1–12.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 16.

60 Ibid., 15; Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire,” 437–460.

61 Lethabo-King, The Black Shoals.

62 Abdou, Islam and Anarchism.

63 Ibid., 34.

64 Abdou, Islam and Anarchism.

65 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 19.

66 Abdou, Islam and Anarchism, 34.

67 Ibid.

68 Brandzel, Against Citizenship, 116–17.

69 Jackman and Upadhyay, “Pinkwatching Israel, Whitewashing Canada”; Krebs and Olwan, “‘From Jerusalem to the Grand River, Our Struggles Are One’”; Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception”; Salaita, Inter/Nationalism; Salamanca, “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine”.

70 Mohamed Abdou (2021) On the Ethics of Disagreements (Uṣūl al-Ikhtilaf) and the Ethics of Hospitality (Uṣūl al-Dhiyafa) Between Spiritual and non-Spiritual Leftists in the Newest Social Movements, Political Theology,

71 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 31–32.

72 Ibid., 4. As Byrd and Rothberg argue, the “question of fit suggests that at stake in exploring the resonance between the categories “subaltern” and “indigenous” is a matter of urgent translation – translation in all its senses, linguistic, cultural, and spatial. Indeed, the question of translation goes beyond the question of how to relate two autonomously developing intellectual traditions to each other (indigenous studies and subaltern/postcolonial studies)” (Ibid., 4).

73 In Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism; also see, Speri, “Fear of a Black Homeland”; Brown, Parrish, and Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used Standing Rock to Defeat Pipeline Insurgency”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohamed Abdou

Mohamed Abdou is the Aracpita Visiting Scholar of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. He graduated from Queen’s University with a Doctorate in Cultural Studies and holds a BAH/MA in Sociology, and previously taught at the American University of Cairo, the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He is a self-identifying migrant settler of color living on the traditional homelands of the Lenni-Lenape and Wappinger peoples. He is author of the book Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). His current project examines how spiritual orientations/practices can inform non-racial conceptualizations of indigeneity and troubles contemporary decolonial social movements that are animated by secular anti-global and anti-Capitalist aspirations.